Sunday, January 14, 2018

Putin Says Communism is Like Christianity and Lenin’s Body a Saint’s Relic

Paul
Goble

Staunton, January 14 – For a
documentary film on the Valaam monastery, Vladimir Putin says that communism at
the ideological level is “in fact” very similar to Christianity and that the
veneration of Lenin’s body in the mausoleum on Red Square resembles the
veneration of the remains of Christian saints by believers.

“Communist ideology is very much like
Christianity in fact,” the Kremlin leader says. “Freedom, brotherhood, equality
and justice all this is at the core of the Holy Scriptures. And what is the
code of the builder of communism? This is sublimation and a primitive extract
from the Bible. Nothing new was invented” (gazeta.ru/social/news/2018/01/14/n_11046320.shtml).

And as for Lenin’s body in the mausoleum,
Putin asks, “How is this different from from the relics of saints for Orthodox
or simply for Christians. I’m told: ‘No, in the Christian world, there is no
such tradition. But isn’t there?Go to
Mount Athos and look at the holy relics there and even here are the relics of
Serhiy and German.”

On the one hand, Putin’s remarks are
nothing but the latest iteration of the view, widespread among many, that
communism from beginning was a modernized and secularized version of
Christianity. Some, for example, have even referred to Karl Marx as “the last great
Catholic priest.

But on the other and more seriously,
they are part and parcel of Putin’s efforts to overcome divisions in Russian
history by presenting the two sides of many conflicts, in this case between the
faithful and the Soviet dictatorship, as in fact simply two facets of one and the
same thing, trivializing fundamental differences in the name of promoting
political unity.